13.5.3 In most cases, not all wind turbine units within a wind turbine farm need to be lighted. Obstruction lights should be placed along the perimeter of the wind turbine farm so that there are no unlit separations or gaps more than 1/2 SM (0.80 km) (see Figure A-26). Wind turbines within a grid or cluster should not have an unlighted separation or gap of more than 1 SM (1.61 km) across the interior of a grid or cluster of turbines
https://ipf.msu.edu/about/news/solar-carport-initiative-earn...
But what I haven't figured out is if they have to broom them off after a snow or just wait until the sun melts it. By the time I am around in the afternoon time they are always cleared.
It might be enough to just form a thin layer of water, so the whole mass of snow slides off.
It would be great if these costs could come down. Parking lots, animal pastures & other areas could be protected & create energy at the same time.
Lat, Lon: 29.701864, -95.388646
And solar has gotten way cheaper since then. It's a no-brainer.
Curious how people run into solar panels. I wonder how many ER visits say "I ran into a solar panel"
If you include stuff like stop signs, light poles, mailboxes, and fences its probably in the several thousands. Fixed object collisions are super common.
In the US, this is not a problem unless you are drunk. When you are driving drunk, you are violating the law anyway.
https://old.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/myfroy/today_the_14th...
https://old.reddit.com/r/HomeImprovement/comments/5da1w1/bes...
https://i95rock.com/how-to-avoid-a-car-crash-as-you-approach...
There are 2.75 - 4 billion buildings on this planet. Something will happen a few times or more than few times. Sometimes asteroids hit the planet and most species go extinct.
Where are ya'll from that people are running into stationary structures all the time? If people have an epidemic of running into stationary things, wouldn't there be a 100x problem of them running into moving things - like cars, trucks, trains, airplanes?
Regardless, why is it okay for people to run into any stationary structure but not okay for people to run into structures that hold solar panels? Or is there some effort to remove ALL stationary structures because of this problem?
For example, light posts constantly get bumped in parking lots.
To hold your solar panels you need really strong posts that can both hold them and get bumped into by vehicles. Especially in the USA where you have giant vehicles & tight parking spaces.
This all adds to the cost before you even get to electricity storage & transmission.
I looked once into solar covers for EV charging spots and it would provide like 5% of energy, not worth the hassle.
For parking the convenience is definitely worth it, but economically I don't think supermarkets care that much.
Vertical panels may even be stacked on top of one another. Considering how big a fan of solar panels this administration is, perhaps the Big Beautiful Border Wall can be built with vertical solar panels.
> a 15K-array, 2.9M-panel dataset of utility and commercial-grade solar farms across the lower 48 states plus the District of Columbia. This dataset was constructed by a team of researchers including alumni from NOAA, NASA and the USGS.
TFG cancelled a fairly far along project to build 6gw of solar in the Nevada desert just a few days ago known as Esmeralda 7.
The ineptitude and grift of this administration will haunt this country for decades.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/feds-appear-to-canc...
> UPDATE: The U.S. Bureau of Land Management responded to 8 News Now on Friday afternoon to clarify the meaning of a “canceled” notice on the Esmeralda Seven Solar Project. A decision to combine the environmental reviews for the seven projects is being changed to give each project the option of submitting their proposal separately. The BLM’s statement: “During routine discussions prior to the lapse in appropriations, the proponents and BLM agreed to change their approach for the Esmeralda 7 Solar Project in Nevada. Instead of pursuing a programmatic level environmental analysis, the applicants will now have the option to submit individual project proposals to the BLM to more effectively analyze potential impacts.”
> The “Cancelled – Cancelled” notice on BLM’s NEPA website applies only to the environmental review stage. The entire project has not been canceled.
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/massive-esmeralda-s...
I do not have a side as I don't know enough.
A great engineer, however, is able to readily admit when one option among others has a far, far greater set of costs than another, for the exact same benefit.
And if said engineer can't decide (for claim of ignorance), they mature to learn that the experience and knowledge of others is the best source for understanding the trade-offs involved to make a decision.
I think its pretty clear solar power has trade-offs. I think it's also obvious solar has far less negatives than all other power generating sources.
Maybe it was a misunderstanding of my intentions to purely share information based on your reply.
If you don't mind, please help me understand. Did it come across as anti-solar in general? That's how I'm interpreting your reply.
The article, which I wonder if anyone read, argues local environmental concerns based on the giant size of the solar farm. One of those things was mountain sheep that migrate across the lands. This would be creating a wall of sorts. Another was Native American archeology. What I'm ignorant of is if any of these issues were addressed at all & what the impact is.
In a general sense, I'm a huge fan of solar farms. I think they make more sense than using land to plant corn for energy, which funny enough also got me down votes here.
If you really care about animals, plants, or archeology, you're probably not a fan of coal or natural gas, which are obviously destructive of geology and habitats, and that's _without_ getting into more nebulous and catastrophic climate stuff.
Based on my research, 1/3 of the land that would have had major construction disturbances effecting plants & archeology. A fair counter argument is that construction crews deal with archeology all the time. I would also assume it should be fairly easy to take rare plants into account & make sure there is an equal amount grown & taken care of after construction is completed. I don't know what plants they are concerned about, but solar farms do improve a lot of vegetation by offering shade & reducing evaporation.
The entire area was to be fenced off which would prevent big horn sheep migration. It seems no pathways were offered to be built to help with migration of animals. This seems like something that could be fairly easy to do though it would add expense of fencing & reduce some solar panels possibly.
So many people constantly talk about the costs of solar. If that is all you are contributing to the discussion, you aren't adding much new or interesting, in my opinion.
As an aside, I also just generally hate when commentors link to stuff with nothing else. It feels smug. Start the discussion you want to spark with honesty and earnest thoughts. Those who "just ask questions" engage in this same tactic to derail topics and pretend like they didn't take any side. Just "linking to useful information". What's useful about it? Highlight something to start discussion.
I am not claiming you are doing these things. But surely you are aware of and can appreciate the tactics of those that spread misinformation.
While I was just trying to help understand some opposing reasons, you're right that it didn't add much to the overall discussion.
Also, the rainfall. Some farmers go from morning to night never saying a word that isn't a complaint about the rainfall being wrong.
My best guess it is because it causes them existential dread by demarcating to them that there once was a time without the new feature. Now kids will be growing up always having there been the new feature. Thus highlighting their own inevitable death.
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
I like industrial architecture and some plants inspire awe but post-war coal plants are as ugly and boring as it gets. Older ones look much better in my eye and I’m glad that some buildings are preserved after the stations are shut down.
Yes. Some of them use proper rain gauges but some just complain about it. Basically none of them understand the difference between a point measurement and an areal average estimate.
Farmers need rain, but there is never a perfect time for it to rain. There is always something they need to do that can't be done because it rained. If rain was 100% predictable months in advance farmers would just plan to not do those things on rain days (rain days often last a couple days because things need to dry), but it isn't and so they often are in the middle of something that cannot be interrupted when rain interrupts them.
Of course the other problem is sometimes it doesn't rain and then they can get all the jobs done above - but because there is no rain nothing grew (well) and so the harvests are bad...
OOOhh is there a device I can get that tracks this for home?
When they first started, they had to build the infrastructure and stations to collect the power to transport it from the turbines. My mom rented out some rooms of her house to make some cash when that went on for maybe 2 years in total. There was a lot of work and money coming into the area for a moment, but now the only people making money are the farmers who own the land the turbines sit on.
It's always a trip to see a view you have seen for 40 years but with the turbines there in the background. Slowly, these rural areas are losing vital services one by one. The specialists stop coming to the hospital, even on rotation. The dentists and optometrists retire out and unless someone growing up there has a passion for teeth and genetically modified corn then the roles get pushed out to the bigger cities, 30-45m away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKgN2G9d0dc
The turbines I saw in Iowa weren't loud enough to drown out distance sounds of the highway. I didn't hear them at all, but I guess there's also tinnitus to be contended with...
Ruin the view,
Lower property values,
Habitat destruction,
Noise from inverter fans
Not just the fans. The transformers, inductors, chokes, capacitors, etc can get extremely noisy as well. I have to plug my ears when I walk by the switchgear at my local Walmart's EV install because it is so loud.
Any system that relies on high rate of change of current over time is prone to these issues. Look at the prevalence of coil whine in gaming PCs and workstations now. The level of noise scales almost linearly with current up until you saturate the various magnetic cores. In a multi-megawatt installation of any kind that relies upon inverters, it is plausible that these electromagnetic acoustic effects could cause meaningful habitat destruction on their own.
Traditional synchronous machines (turbines) do not have this issue, but they are not something you want to live next to for reasons on the other end of the acoustic frequency spectrum. Infrasound from a turbine can travel for miles, especially during transient phases of operation. There were a lot of complaints on social media during the commissioning of a new natural gas generator unit in my area last year.
I was on many solar farms, and the only ones that I could hear from the distance were the ones that had classic substations nearby. The 60Hz transformer sound can be heard for quite a distance.
Please. You won't hear it even a couple hundred meters away.
As for habitat destruction, wildlife _loves_ the shade under solar panels. So much that you need to be careful where you step because rattlesnakes also love (to eat) the wildlife.
Moreover, unlike mines and coal power plants, solar plants are mostly build-and-forget installations. They can be completely unmanned, with only occasional visits for maintenance and panel cleaning.
I'm less than $8k in on the solar part of this and it's been more reliable than my neighbor's grid power.
But maybe my enjoyment of the panel set is also a "fringe" opinion. I know folks that live near larger installations with less direct impacts and they seem to have fewer feelings about those plants.
I'm pro nuclear power, but I couldn't resist the pop culture reference. And it's good to remember what can go wrong when people's fallibility interacts with a powerful technology.
(Dialog from a memorable Call of Duty level based on Pripyat, Ukraine, near Chernobyl)
Many old school plants also rely on dams and provide massive ponds. Which sucks during construction when some people have to move. But in my experience after several decades people are pretty happy to live next to those massive ponds. If I'd have to pick living next to a massive lake which allows boats/yachts/etc (which is not so common in my whereabouts) with a plant on the other side of that lake vs. lake-sized solar plant... Former does sound better.
The good news is, they'll rapidly adapt to each new solar farm; the bad news is, they'll forget about all the ones they're used to by the time comes to expand — I've seen anecdotes of the same thing happening with power lines, where people were upset that some proposed new ones would ruin the view, the person proposing them said they wouldn't be any different from the current ones, and the complainers said "what current ones?" and had to have them pointed out.
Farm-scale irrigation is not silent.
Crop Dusters are not silent.
Combines and other tractors are not silent.
Burning fields are both not silent and release a tremendous amount of sooty smoke that spreads far beyond the boundaries of a farm.
Farms make a lot of noise.
Depending upon their other priorities, they may be upset about the loss of hunting access as well. Understandably, people putting up solar arrays don't want people firing guns in the middle of their arrays.
If I were to hazard a guess every person complaining would happily suffer the 'consequences' of a solar farm not being near their neighborhood.
It really should be a no brainer compromise to zone solar as industrial so they're not near where people live. There's in practice infinite amounts of land you can get zoned like this. Living to electrical noise sucks in a way living need next to a wind farm doesn't.
You won't have to hear it, you won't have to look at it except as way off in the distance, you won't have to worry about whether or not your buddy's farm is gonna get taken over by one when they run into financial troubles. Out your backyard you get to look at mostly pristine farmland and wilderness. During this time where there's political will and capital to just ban them outright I think this relatively small concession will make folks not put up too much in a fight as long as it's kept out of sight out of mind.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2987251/Charges-aga...
https://www.theroot.com/atlanta-garbage-man-sentenced-to-jai...
That man shouldn't have been personally sentenced to anything, but it's a legitimate complaint to fix.
Like what?
Sure, it's better than a gas refinery or some other things you could find yourself living next to. But let's not ignore what's bad about our current solutions.
What I mean is that solar is good, and I support using it in a lot of places. But it's also open to bad decisions like everything else, so I try not to be a zealot about it. It's not the end all perfect cure for energy and it doesn't save the environment in all cases. Just in many.
Vs. almost any other business (farm, mine, oil drilling, warehouse, whatever) would both hire far more local people, and interact far more with the local community.
Or - maybe you're an introvert, or live in a place where it's normal to have no social relationships with your neighbors. If so, try talking to somebody who has lived in a small farming community. It is a very, very different world.
I've had six decades around rural communities, mostly in Australia, often in far flung parts of the world, there are few here that feel solar farms are dystopian giga-scale machines, mostly they think of them as dual use for pasture and additional guaranteed farm income.
Raised panels make the moisture retention better, increase the nutritional value of the ground cover and makes for better wool - all positives.
OTOH, it sounds like your experience is with solar/farming dual-use. Vs. America seems inclined to a "buy the land, kick off the farmers, put up the panels, and post the No Humans Allowed signs" monoculture model. Which can be all to easy to scale up & do, from a Wall Street point of view.
Wall Street isn't exactly the brightest when it comes to optimal approaches.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...
( FWiW the counter arguments raised in anticipation in that three plus year old article didn't come to fruition in the time since across many sites - we do pay attention to water tables here in Australia following disastrous effects of over clearing for 80 years that ended some 50 years past )
The largest current complaint hereabouts in the farming community is the looming onset of a mega garbage dump for the nearest city. It's promised to be well sealed and well maintained, but local people are upset by the intrusion of convoys of garbage from the city - more noise and traffic than a few thousand hectares of solar panels.
Personally I like seeing renewables, big or small, cleanly producing energy for us to use. It's a small pro-social signal about environmental responsibility.
(my pet local hate, recently remediated after years of complaints from a twenty mile radius: Mossmorran flaring by Exxon-Mobil https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-5... )
the blue states have a lot of energy solar - while the red ones are sparse. the red ones get a lot of sun while the blue ones don't.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/texas-tops-us-states...
ERCOT has also had a number of spectacular -- and costly -- failures.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...
Especially as you install more wind and solar, capturing (or sending) generation across a wider geographic area should regress-to-the-mean production and consumption better without turning on peaking plants that may be on for only hours a year. Or get natgas generation from areas where the natgas infra hasn't frozen solid.
https://www.ferc.gov/introductory-guide-electricity-markets-... ("ERCOT is not subject to federal (FERC) jurisdiction because its grid is not connected to those of other states. Thus, power sales in ERCOT are not considered sales in interstate commerce and not subject to federal (FERC) oversight. That said, ERCOT runs some electricity markets that have similarities to those described herein.")
Edit: This is only up until recently; Texas is seeking to potentially interconnect with neighboring grids, forgoing FERC independence in the process.
Texas Bill [H.B. 199] Opens ERCOT to Grid Interconnection - https://www.environmentenergyleader.com/stories/texas-bill-o... - July 25th, 2025 ("A completed interconnection—either synchronous or non-synchronous—would likely bring ERCOT under partial federal jurisdiction for the first time since its creation. Currently, ERCOT operates almost entirely within Texas to avoid triggering FERC oversight under the Federal Power Act.")
Connecting Past and Future: A History of Texas’ Isolated Power Grid - https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/connecting-past-and-... - December 1st, 2022
Why Texas Has Its Own Power Grid - https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/08/why-texas-has-it... - August 18th, 2003
> [1] In the 1939 case United States v. Rock Royal Co-op, the Supreme Court had included milk processed and sold entirely within the state of New York within the federal government's purview because the company used a mixture of raw milk from farms within and outside the state of New York.
Like there's no way all of the energy in Texas only comes from Texas supplied materials.
I can't find the court case I want but there's another one about how somebody's local consumption had an effect on the interstate price so growing plants for local use can be federally regulated. And therefore, to me, FERC's existence effects the price of electricity on the rest of the states.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wrightwood_Da....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection (see Ties section)
(Yes, they have to be HVDC or VFT).
Quebec operates like Texas does, for political reasons too, with ample export and import capacity (import/export capacity = 15/20% of peak consumption)
And still, we've seen a massive amount of green energy installed here. Both windmills and solar farms.
But when you look at a grid map you pretty quickly understand why that's the case.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-NW-IPCO/live/fif...
Right now, about 6% of my power comes from natural gas. That's the only fossil fuel power I'm currently using. Everything else is solar/hydro/wind. Not sure why nuclear isn't listed, I thought we had an active plant here. But you get the picture.
For my grid, new solar or wind is simply not needed so why would we be anywhere near the top of installation? Batteries is what we actually need.
There is a point where it's a bad idea to install more renewables.
They have a plan to be 100% renewable by 2030 and I believe they'll actually hit that target given how close they already are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fowler_Ridge_Wind_Farm
We also have a ton of solar. We could be doing much better as we also have an enormous amount of coal plants.
wind turbines are wonderful things to look at. but yeah some of those were constructed in the years there was a "blue" admin n I guess market forces took over too.
Saudi Arabia generates ~41% of its electricity from oil, 59% from natgas and <1% solar. Talk about mismanagement...
https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/SAU/electrici...
The curious thing is that so many of these kinds of claims can be disproven in literally seconds to minutes in any debate, yet they persist.
Certain tendencies aside, republican and conservatives types aren't utter idiots and do know how sidestep some rally talk to serve their own benefit if they think it's practical, profitable and useful.
Not to mention that many conservatives love the field of off-grid prepping to this day and would certainly know about the value of solar, wind, hydro and any other robust renewable power technology. You're not going to build a coal plant or an oil refinery next to your deep-woods Utah cabin.
I'd imagine a lot of the lack of solar farms in the rural midwest and southwest is due to land use conflicts with ag and ranching. I don't have data to back that up though, just a hunch.
What money? Power bills won't go down. The solar panel factories aren't in that county. The installers will be brought in from out of state contractors.
Source: the butt tons of wind farms that sell their power to the state next door and the fact that our power bill has doubled in that time frame.
This is something I don’t really get. There’s always concern around change of course. But tending to renewables sounds so much nicer than fossil fuel issues. Like clearing snow off the panels doesn’t sound fun exactly, but it is outdoors… realistically for these giant fields of panels it should be a fairly mechanized process, so somewhat low impact… compare to black lung or, whatever, petrochemicals causing your tap water to catch fire.
If there's a foot of snow on the panels they don't catch any sun, don't get warm, and it doesn't melt off.
More than about 3 inches needs to be manually cleared.
Often exceeding the energy gained in the winter.
Oconto County averages between 4 and 5 feet of snow every winter. You need pretty heavy duty equipment to move that much snow out of a large field.
Most of Wisconsin doesn't actually get that much snow, though.
It just seems like a less unpleasant and less unhealthy job than pretty much anything related to petrochemicals, haha.
> 1/3 of corn is used for fuel - https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detai...
> Corn raises temp & humidity - https://extension.illinois.edu/news-releases/corn-fields-add...
> Corn destroys farmland & requires very high fertilizer & pesticide inputs, plus extra fuel to to apply all those - ask any old farmer but this one has a lot of sources
Also solar farms can easily be hidden. They don't need to be next to a public road way and you can put trees around them. They're also great for dual use land with small animals &/or certain crops.
Not sure why they are whining. Sounds like job creation to me!
On the other hand, at the federal level Republican admins tend to cut renewable subsidies and that sort of thing.
Red states have a lot of open space and ought to be ideologically in favor is loose regulations; it would be kind of nice if Republican national politicians would fully embrace cronyism and identify renewable subsidies as an easy way to give money to their supporters. “Oh we did the environmental survey it turns out we should plop down a bunch of subsidized renewable installations in Red states.” Plenty of room for pork and might actually help the country as a side effect…
I think a lot of (honest) smart people would say that there are circumstances where even for those of us who love green energy (raises hand) subsidies aren't the most productive use of tax dollars. It can distort markets and can make the subsidized industry wasteful and uncompetitive, begetting reliance on the subsidy instead of pressuring them to compete.
Solar and wind in 2025 aren't some fragile, experimental things that would die without subsidies. At this point they ought to be able to compete normally, and they can. Given a high percentage of the government dollars spent today aren't even tax dollars, they're borrowed money, at now-increasing interest rates, for our grandchildren to deal with, I'd rather not subsidize businesses that can get by on their own now.
On flip side the orangutang cut green energy subsidies on grade A farmland, which most likely wasn't happening anyway.
Looking at, say, wind energy, the top 4 states are all red states. Their cumulative amount handily is more than the next so many states.
That's absolute energy. If you want to go by percentage of energy that is wind, it's the same - the top 4 are red states. In fact, 7 of the top 10 are:
https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/wind-generation-by-...
I haven't looked at solar, but it doesn't seem there's a clear divide.
It’s also a double entendre depending on which light you see “woke” in.
It's like hating bikers, why? The same people that have pickup trucks and swerve to intimidate bikers, seem to hate solar energy. But why?
To the extent that there is anything real to their dislike:
Poorly structured/overly generous homeowner net metering initiatives, especially for solar without storage, legitimately have escalated costs for everyone else in some regions.
The excessive subsidy given to those homeowners for power that's often not very valuable (as it comes primarily at a time of day that's already well supplied) comes from somewhere, and somewhere is....the pockets of everyone who doesn't have home rooftop solar.
And those people are typically poorer people in rented, denser housing than the average homeowner.
Most places have been moving to correct this mistake for the future (ex: CA's "Net Metering 3.0"), but that also gets pushback from people who wanted to take advantage of that unsustainable deal from the government or who incorrectly think it's a part of general anti-renewable pushes.
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Aside from that, in regions known for production of coal/oil/gas or major processing of, it's seen as a potential threat to jobs + mineral tax revenues that are often what underwrite most of their local/state government functions.
While there are plenty of job creation claims for renewables, it doesn't take a genius to see that they don't appear to need all that many workers once built, and that the manufacturing chain for the solar panels or wind turbines is probably not to be put in places like West Virginia, Midland TX, Alaska, etc.
Highest output of solar is during the day.
Your comment about energy supply implies we just don't need any solar at all.
I think we need is a large set of incentives to do home solar with storage.
We shouldn't be overpaying in generous subsidies to homeowners for power mid-day where it's now worth the least.
Early net metering schemes were often basically 1:1. You supply a kWh mid-day where it's not worth much and that's "equal" in value to you drawing a kWh at 18:30, even though the market price of electricity then might be 10x what it was when you earned your "credit" and the grid is far more strained.
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Most regions that already have a decent amount of behind the meter home solar at this point exhibit a strong "duck curve" effect, at least on sunnier days. Mid-day demand is deeply suppressed while solar output is strongest.
Meanwhile, the AM/PM peaks remain and are at times of the day when solar output is very low.
With more storage - solar can help cover those peaks (+ overnight demand). Without, you're not accomplishing all that much by just depressing mid-day loads even further unless you can restructure society to better match it's energy demands to those solar supply curves.
A few illustrations/articles:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56880
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
https://www.iso-ne.com/about/where-we-are-going/solar-power-... (New England).
Maybe not literally everywhere, but almost everywhere would continue to benefit from more solar even if it's lacking storage. Despite the duck curve.
> We shouldn't be overpaying in generous subsidies to homeowners for power mid-day where it's now worth the least.
It's a bad way to do a renewable subsidy, but we do want some kind of subsidy and flawed is usually better than nothing. I'd prefer replacing the subsidies with a carbox tax but that is not going to happen.
p.s. owner of self-installed 7kW ground mount array in New Mexico
The energy industry is one of the largest in the world, with trillions of revenue on the line. The FF component of that industry has every incentive to turn sentiment against upstart competitors, but you do that at scale less by reasoned arguments and more by gut level appeals: "the people who want renewable energy hate your culture and way of life", "renewal installations are ugly and a blight on the landscape of your home", etc.
This has often been blamed on first past the post voting - if you want to win you have to team up which means your views on Abortion and Environment Policy have to align even though there is no reason to think the two should have anything to do with one another. Since there is no room for thinking each side is correct one one and wrong on the other you have to oppose anything the other does without wondering if maybe they are correct. Now remember that are thousands (millions?) of different issues, and many of them have a range of different answers, yet there can only be one unified position that you support...
I'm not convinced that the various alternatives are really better though. They all seem to have issues in the real world, and too often people will look at what they have an ignore the issues because they want to feel better.
Challenge accepted. Receipts please.
Don't get too smug. You really think your entire half of a political spectrum is free of stupidity and irrational thinking?
1: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/new-report-highlights-us-2...
What current policy, legislation, court decisions, etc do you oppose?
But that wasn't my point, it was "hate against the right". See, here's the thing: the Right is now defined by literally hating the Left. "woke" has been repurposed to mean "stupid libtard shit" but nobody actually can define what that is other than cherry picking some rando ultra leftist's comments as being representative to the group as a whole.
I've lived my many years in liberal bubbles and I've never heard anyone express actual hate people on the right -- just a lot of bewilderment, disappointment, and lately a lot of fear.
The whole Red v. Blue game is a stupid simple yet highly effective trick to get the masses squabbling against each other rather than uniting to resist our owners.
Given the current political climate, the left should definitely get on board with this one ASAP.
There's lunacy on both sides for sure, but MAGA has a pretty strong hold on blatant cruelty when it comes to their issues. Also, I'd argue the Overton window has shifted pretty far right, so you have to be pretty extreme to be considered a right wing extremist these days. In fact, some of the major MAGA rallying points could actually be points of compromise to most progressives if they weren't so cruel about it (ICE, farm slavery visas, trans sports). Plus curiously the one we could all agree on but don't hear much about on the right anymore; Epstein.
I think most people would be less opposed if they saw the math behind more of the actual PV installations.
> It's like hating bikers, why?
Totally off topic, but I was walking through a city yesterday. Cars politely stopped for me as I crossed roads. Bikes didn't, and they also swerved onto sidewalks past me. They obeyed fewer rules of the road and put me at greater risk of harm than did any vehicle.
I grew up an avid bicyclist out in the countryside, but people on bikes in the city manage to piss me off far more than most drivers do.
When I ride a bike, I don’t do it in places where, when I encounter a bike driving, it makes me especially anxious.
I’d like to see car use reduced as much as the next sane person, but I still go “ah, goddamnit” when I see a bicyclist approaching an intersection or come up on one going uphill on a twisty no-shoulder 35+ mph road.
That's your choice to make, and the one you're making now is not invalid or indefensible. It does, however, remain a choice.
Of course that's chaos. Cars approaching an intersection have a really small set of things they're more than 1-in-100,000 likely to do. It's fairly predictable. Bikes can do and in fact do all kinds of different things. It's way, way harder to read their intentions or likely next actions. The space of what they might do includes basically all the same things a car might do, plus a whole bunch of other things. All while they're extremely vulnerable.
I don't get your point in emphasizing that this is a choice. Some kind of Stoicism kick? Like sure OK yes all emotions are a choice, sorta, kinda, OK, I got there and actually did the reading literally decades ago, I get what you mean. I'm trying to express that bikes being on a road introduce a whole lot of extra stress for drivers that yet-another-car does not, as a reason that many drivers even if they are very careful around bicyclists and do not hate them at all are still bummed out when they see one on the road.
[EDIT: FWIW I'm about 50% as sad to see a motorcycle as I am a bicyclist, for similar reasons that they have a wider set of things they are likely enough to do that I need to worry about it (the small size is a lot of this, in both cases) and in fact do insane shit all the time (I've certainly seen a lot more wheelies-while-speeding-in-traffic from motorcycles than bicycles, LOL). Only 50% as sad because they can keep pace with flow-of-traffic, which makes for less passing with extreme speed differences, and they're far less likely to do something truly nuts at an intersection (though I still can hardly believe "lane splitting" is legal, it seems batshit crazy to me)]
On the other hand I think lane splitting motorcycles are still surprising to most motorists, and surprise leads to a lot of accidents.
Last but not least, Chinese domination in modern solar equipment is mind-boggling. At least when I was installing solar, buying western-made would have been much more expensive, to the point that it wouldn't be worth to go through.
P.S. I got solar on the roof myself. „Free“ electricity is damn nice.
1. “The grid needs an upgrade”. This is true regardless of whether solar exists or not. Energy demand, battery technology, etc have all changed but the grid has not kept pace (on purpose). End customers may foot the bill, again, regardless of solar.
2. Solar does receive more subsidies, intentionally. This is how you quickly drive adoption of new technology and stop the old technology (gas/coal) from using its market power to stop new technology growth. Subsidies jumpstart the switch to solar, which in the long term is good for our country (export more energy), our planet, and for individuals who want energy independence.
3. Taxes aren’t flat rates, so when you make more you pay more progressively. A poor person pays significantly less than a rich person does for solar subsidies.
4. Chinese domination isn’t a reason for not using solar. If we want to change that, the US should motivate buyers to buy US (subsidize), increase import costs (targeted, time limited tariffs), or promote growth of the industry (education, research, etc).
For big commercial arrays, the grid used to have main lines to certain old school plants. Now for solar new major lines are needed to middle-of-nowhere locations to connect solar and wind farms. While old-school plants were more concentrated and closer to major locations, it was less costly than major lines out-there and to many more locations. And, obviously, investors into solar/wind ain't willing to food those bills.
The problem with solar subsidies, especially when it comes to home solar, is that they're very skewed to favor better-off people.
As for Chinese, yes, something needs to be done. But for now I kinda understand people who ain't happy subsidies are ending up in China.
>3. Taxes aren’t flat rates, so when you make more you pay more progressively. A poor person pays significantly less than a rich person does for solar subsidies.
Yes, subsidies are done to help drive adoption. The key is that the subsidies should go where they can do the most good. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further to decarbonizing the grid than a dollar spent subsidizing rooftop residential solar. It is understandable that anyone getting free money thinks it is good. But if the less well off people (renters, etc.) learn that they are paying a great deal more for power to subsidize wealthier residents (when that money could have gone MUCH further if spent on other solar projects) - it isn’t hard to imagine that might lower enthusiasm for government subsidizing the move away from fossil fuels. This sort of wealth transfer to the more wealthy actually hurts everyone in the long run. The goal should be to decarbonize the grid - not implement some kind of a reverse Robinhood scheme.
Seems like all over the place we are giving up and letting China win the technology race. Robots, cars, solar, all the future tech is in trouble.
I don't know why anybody is against clean air. It makes no sense.
One of it's potential weapons against China is that China imports most of it's oil & gas. China also has a few easy geographical choke points to prevent it from importing gas. Solar & wind plus electrical vehicles destroy this advantage.
So China has many reasons to push in this direction while the US is doubling down on it's bet, even while other historical oil countries like Saudi Arabia are diversifying away from oil.
It should also be noted that many Chinese companies are selling at a loss or very low margin, especially the electric car companies. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/china-is-sending-its-...
We know the shale oil boom wont last, that larger reserves are in other countries. The Us should be diversifying now, before it runs out. To be prepared. Eventually we'll just be back to beholding to some other country for oil.
It's like we were granted some breathing room and just squandering it, when we could be leaping ahead by developing other sources of energy.
To try and put that in a more sympathetic light, they don't want to hear they need to invest a significant chunk of their income in reducing that harm (like improving the efficiency of their home, installing PV, driving an EV or even biking to work instead of hopping in the pickup). It'd be nice if there were some subsidies to make that easier... except those are now getting the axe.
A questiom: What do you think, do people first have an emotion and then try to rationalize it? Or do they first have a the rational judgment and only after that start to become emotional?
If you watch right wing media it is pretty clear that emotions play a huge role for them. And because nobody particularly likes having emotions they can't explain, the rationalizations come after: "Windmills are destroy the landscape" (unlike let's say an oilfield which is somehow totally fine), things about the infrasound (which if a concern you can get rid off by the same way it is done with nuclear waste in the US, just use that massive land mass to your advantage).
If we had rational, emotionally distanced actors they would change their mind once all doubts are addressed and the facts are on the table. But that is not the case here in my own experience. Once the last rationalization breaks they go back to the feeling of: "I just don't like it".
That means the much more fruitful question to investigate is that particular dislike and where it might come from, emotionally.
Surely this isn't just one root. For some it may be the "safe" opinion of their herd/tribe. Others say it, their entertainment (that under traditional media law wouldn't deserve the title "News") says it and so on.
For yet others this may be a question of their insecure masculinity. They feel insecure, but men have to be strong! So they try their best to appear strong, by buying manly products, driving manly trucks and spouting manly opinions. You know what isn't manly in their mind? Being sensible. Sensible with other people, the environment, wensible with thought. And then a sensible energy option come around. Guess what, that feels like an attack to them. Suddenly society wants to erect huge pillars thst remind them that being sensible is now required. That really touches their core fear of not being manly enough. Being sensible could be misread as being gay after all.
There are probably more reasons.
P.S.: I am not saying there are no rational critics of wind energy. Whwt I am saying is the bulk of categorical dislike comes from an entirely uninformed, purely emotional direction
Electricity in SF is now more than $0.50/kWh OFF peak.
It is certainly not a coincidence that CalISO has contracted with the most solar generators.
Notably, the municipal power companies mostly are far lower. It's PG&E and SoCal Edison who are that high, because they're shoving the costs of doing 75 years worth of deferred system maintenance all at once onto current ratepayers instead of their investors taking the hit. It's too bad that there wasn't a viable legal framework whereby the investor-owned utilties' shareholders could be wiped out as they deserved to be, and the utility infrastructure transferred to municipal ownership. Around PG&E's bankruptcy there were rumblings, but Sacramento couldn't figure out how to do it, so they propped them up and created a Wildfire Fund paid for by ratepayers to keep bailing them out.
On top of that the subsidies for solar installations are mostly frontloaded, since the costs are frontloaded. Annual tax breaks are transferrable, so they get sold at the beginning of the project to offset investment cost, lowering interest payments. Even removing tax breaks would not make existing installations less profitable.
Some people also complain about Solar being front loaded. But a power plant is also paid for up front. I'd like to see life time costs, minus subsidies.
This administration is openly touting “beautiful clean coal” (doesn’t exist) for powering servers. Renewables are yet another front where people are divided based on politics. It has little to do with efficacy or practicality. I still have family members convinced that offshore wind power is mass-killing whales because of Carlson.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...
And if they are anything like the people I've talked to, they never once cared about whales (or any sea life) before this. Same with the "wind turbines kills birds" or even "trans women are ruining women's sports". Ahh yes, a whole list of things you've never cared about, made fun of, or derided in the past but now suddenly care about because of some talking head. It's exhausting.
Colleges already have the facilities to host games so it seems like an easy steal as there's actually a lot of money in (certain) woman's sports (i.e. USMNT and USWNT in soccer have similar revenue but different salaries) but the salaries are low so its an easier target then say the NFL.
Males who transition to female are not males. They are female/women. It is already not permissible for men to compete in women-only sports.
This became a national issue when many politicians and pundits saw a new vector to attack the trans community. We have heard it on campaign trails constantly for years now as if it’s some existential threat to the country. Your (incorrectly) characterizing it as some grassroots movement by concerned women across the nation who “simply don’t want men competing in women’s sports” is exactly what they hoped would happen over time because it gives them plausible cover.
Yes sports are a spectator event but I guarantee you not one of these people has watched women’s sports outside of exciting Olympic bids. They can’t name a single women’s soccer team in the US or a single star WNBA player. The sport is not the concern at all and we shouldn’t pretend it is.
This is precisely the point of contention. The people who want women's sports leagues to be able to legally or socially-acceptably bar transwomen want this precisely because they do not consider trans women to have the meaningful female characteristics that justify having a female-specific sports league to begin with.
I'm personally ambivalent on this point, and it's because I don't actually care about women's sports one way or the other (I barely care about men's sports). But if you do care about women's sports, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that you might have good reasons to want to restrict trans women from participating for the same reasons you want to restrict cis men from participating.
They can talk about physical advantages/fairness in sports in good faith without erasing their identities and saying “it’s a fact that biology says they’re not women,” which is wrong. That’s just ignorance and/or transphobia, not a healthy discussion about advantages in competition.
“Men in women’s sports” is often convenient cover for many people to participate in erasure without copping to the fact that they’re just uncomfortable with trans people simply existing (or worse). Most of them, especially men with media reach/political clout constantly talking about it, are not passionate about women’s sports in the slightest and couldn’t care less if the playing field was level. So we can’t sit here and pretend that’s what this discussion is really about.
It’s very similar to when incels said “it’s about ethics in gaming journalism” during gamergate. Yeah, some people care about that legitimately, and there is a legitimate discussion to be had, but that wasn’t what the movement was actually about in any real sense. It just gave them a palatable reason to project to more reasonable people.
For instance, all three medallists in the women's 800m at the 2016 Rio Olympics were male. They had been issued with female birth certificates by their home countries due to having underdeveloped external male genitalia - and therefore according to the rules at the time could enter as female - but they still benefited from testosterone-driven development.
World Athletics, and other sports governing bodies for other sports, have tightened their eligibility criteria in response to cases like this, and in light of evidence that male advantage is still retained even with pharmaceutical or surgical treatments. This has been an ongoing problem for much longer than US pundits have been bringing it up in relation to trans, and it's adversely affected many female athletes, from amateur leagues to international competition.
No they are not. You can debate physical advantages but I won’t indulge transphobia. If you can’t stop then I have no desire to continue this discussion.
What specific criteria are you using to place individuals at different points on this spectrum, and how do you calculate if an individual is closer to one end or the other of this spectrum compared to another individual? Which evidence supports these decisions?
Given that most species reproduce sexually, how does this concept work for the vast diversity of non-human species - including ones with a hermaphroditic reproductive strategy?
If a biologist discovers a new sexually reproducing species where the two halves of the reproductive system are embodied separately, how does she work out which are the archetypal females and which are the archetypal males, and how does she determine where she should place any later sampling of the population across the sex spectrum?
I would hope that anyone who confidently proclaims that sex exists on a spectrum will have ready answers for all of these challenges.
So this boils down to the question of essentially "if everything is on a spectrum, how can we categorize it?" and the answer basically boils down to "it's arbitrary." This is essentially called analog-to-discrete conversion. To skip ahead, human sex is on what's called a bimodal distribution. That means there's two big bumps on either end of the spectrum, and very little in the middle, but it's still accepted to be a spectrum. We can just "summarize" it by sorting them into discrete categories. Let's use voltage as an example! Common voltages have 0V for "False" and 1V for "True," right? For discrete signals. But what if the voltage is .3V? If the exact voltage isn't important, we can "summarize" it by setting an arbitrary limit (generally .5V), and then anything below gets summarized to 0V or "False," and anything over or including .5 V gets sorted into 1V or "True," but it's important to note that this has NOTHING to do with the underlying voltage we are measuring. The limit is arbitrary and we're only doing it because the exact measurement in this particular case isn't that important. Science is like this in general: we have the data that we don't understand, and we try to categorize it to make sense of it. But this obviously fundamentally doesn't change whatever we are actually measuring, this is just how we are defining and categorizing that information.
We don't have to imagine other forms of sexually reproducing species; we have many, many, many other examples across life, insects, mammals, bacteria all have different ways of combining genetics and reproducing. Clown fish are pretty much all hermaphrodites and can switch genders under stress, and this isn't that uncommon. There are plenty of examples of intersex individuals who can still reproduce, and plenty who can't for a variety of reasons. Humans are one of the few species that go through menopause, for example. The general idea for this two is talking about general reproductive strategies (for example, XY chromosomes etc etc) is different from talking about an individual, which might be sterile, intersex, whatever. This also is where societal roles come into play et cetera. This is a much larger discussion, though, and it would be difficult for me to summarize here, but I hope I've at least given you some terms so you can understand what's happening. Basically what science does is work from a bottom up approach: we have a lot of data, and we try to understand what is going on by applying labels and seeing if that helps, but these labels and limits are all changing and arbitrary, it doesn't actually affect what we're measuring. We try to use words to describe biology, we can't use words to influence biology, if that makes sense. A statistics class would probably help describe this better.
Edit: So part of the reason why I initially responded was because I was hoping to understand your perspective a little better, since I've heard it before and I find it fairly perplexing. I have a background in biology, science, and engineering in general, and this is just generally how science is done, I haven't said anything particularly controversial here as far as I'm aware. We create models based on what we think is happening, come up with a hypothesis and an intervention and then we experiment on it and try to see how our model compares to what's actually happening. We try to update words to match the data that we see, we don't try to impose words on data, that seems backwards. Are you open to talking a bit more about how you're thinking and reasoning about this?
By "human sex" I'm referring to everything that developmentally contributes to a human sexual genotype or phenotype. Here is a fun textbook example of all the things that go into human sexual development: https://open.lib.umn.edu/evosex/chapter/8-7-variations-in-hu...
From all these variables alone, we know there is some kind of spectrum to human sexual development. When we say something like "binary" that specifically means a discrete data type: true or false (nothing in between). Binary explicitly means there are two options and nothing else (discrete). For example, humans and butterflies, there's zero half-human half-butterfly hybrid. They're discrete. Most things in real life, however, are some form of continuous spectrum, and that's where "spectrum" comes is. We already know based on how many variables go into human sexuality that it's some form of spectrum for an individual, at the very, very least: male, some kind of intersex, or female. It's not binary (two options) for individuals.
(NOTE: also this is just for humans. As I mentioned, "female" and "male" aren't even that useful in a large part of life on Earth. There's a type of sea slug that essentially has penis battles to determine who donates which gamete, essentially, since every individual is capable of both at all times. As I mentioned before, all clownfish are hermaphrodites, they can switch if they need to. Many frogs and lizards can be too. That's why "female" and "male" are such abstract concepts, trying to describe generalized reproduction can be pretty gnarly once you get into any kind of detail, so no wonder the terms are fairly overloaded).
As I mentioned before, some of the factors that go into human sexual development include (1) number of chromosomes, (2) number of X's and Y's, (3) SRY gene on the Y chromosome, if present, (4) human sex hormones including the many forms of estrogen, testosterone, androgens etc, (for this discussion, probably not hormones like FSH, LH etc), (5) the receptors for these hormones. All of these things (and more) go into human sexual development. But you might have already noticed an issue with it: for example, all humans, regardless of sexual phenotype generally have both testosterone and androgens ("male" hormones) and various forms of estrogen ("female" hormones), so how does that work? How can we "measure" "sex"? What even is "sex"?
There's a few different abstractions at play. There's general abstractions like "female" and "male," which have multiple meanings. When we're making big generalizations about reproduction, it's helpful to talk about two general types of roles for mammals. For example, the male and female gametes for mammals are ova and sperm. We can also use it to talk about male and female hormones, estrogen, androgens, progesterone, FSH, LH, testosterone, to name a few. These are useful for talking about general reproductive abstractions, but each individual has aspects from both of these abstractions (estrogen, testosterone, androgens), so it's not a one-to-one mapping. You can't say "oh, human sexuality is determined by chromosomes," because it's not: XXY, XYY, and SRY gene all exist. You can't say "human sexuality is completely based on gametes" because hermaphrodites can have both ova and sperm, so are they male or female? That kind of thing. There's no "one determining" factor for human biological sex. Multiple things go into it, and therefore it's some kind of spectrum based on all the factors that go in.
When we talk about gender this becomes even more readily apparent. There's no "one determining factor" for what makes a woman or a man. It can't be chromosomes, SRY, hormones, gametes, or any one thing alone. We also know that it can't purely be about reproduction: infertile or sterile men and women can still be considered men and women. And this is just English, there are plenty of other languages that have had and have always had more than two main gender roles etc. So what on earth is it? The truth is, it's literally just an arbitrary line in the sand that we're trying to come to some form of consensus on. In general, we've found the most respectful way to do this, is to treat everyone as fully functional humans and have them self-report based on their language, culture, experience et cetera. Language and words are constantly changing and updating with our understanding, so whatever we decide on today, might change in the future too and that doesn't matter either.
Does that help the discussion at all? This is all fairly standard, there are quite a few textbooks on it, including the one I linked if you're interested.
More importantly, there's not really any reason to do so, as every one of those DSDs can be explained with the binary sex model and a mechanistic understanding of human sex development. Take 5-alpha reductase deficiency for example, it's caused by mutations in the SRD5A2 gene, which adversely affects conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone, causing internal testes and an underdeveloped penis, but otherwise normal male sex development including testosterone-driven male puberty. It would be pointless to try to place this somewhere on a spectrum, as it offers no additional explanatory power and just obfuscates the detail.
In your spectrum model, you seem to be using the word "sex" to describe some sort of undefined (and apparently undefinable) composite statistical scoring of a set of dissociated sex-linked characteristics, that is focused almost entirely on those present in humans. However, this is not how biologists would typically think of sex. Fundamentally it is about evolutionary questions, like: why does sex exist, why is it a stable reproductive strategy across almost all complex life? And it is about developmental questions: what makes sexed bodies, what are the underlying mechanisms? I don't understand how adopting a "sex is a spectrum" belief would help answer these.
You mention hermaphrodites but again I don't see how the spectrum model does anything but fail here? It offers no useful insights - the binary sex model is perfectly adequate to explain that an individual embodies both female and male halves of the reproductive system.
I hope this helps clarify my points, interested to read your response.
Female: (1) Of or denoting the sex that produces ova or bears young. (2) Characteristic of or appropriate to this sex in humans and other animals. (3) Of or denoting the gamete that is larger and less motile than the other corresponding gamete. Used of anisogamous organisms. (4) Designating an organ, such as a pistil or ovary, that functions in producing seeds after fertilization. (5) Bearing pistils but not stamens; pistillate.
There's a few others, but that's why both males and females have both "male" and "female" sex hormones. They're different levels of abstraction. Yes, talking about these abstractions is very convenient for reproduction, that's why we created them, but they're inherently abstract. Just like talking about a voltage as 0V or "OFF" or "FALSE" when it's actually 0.12323V is perfectly convenient and useful.
I actually talk to several biologists on a regular basis, and this is all pretty standard, because mostly what we're doing is just talking about how science works and data.
Being dependent on multiple variables, having that many possible dimensions, makes the data a spectrum. We can summarize that data in arbitrary ways, including drawing an arbitrary line and sorting them into categories, but that doesn't fundamentally change the data. No one is confused when we talk about male and female hormones within an individual. If a person who presents as phenotypically female and considers herself a woman comes into a doctor's office and it's discovered she has XY chromosomes, no one is that surprised: we know about the SRY gene, we know about lack of testosterone receptors etc etc, we understand this is normal. Or if someone presenting as a woman comes in with a beard, no one is surprised. Hirsutism in PCOS is fairly common. We know men and women have both male and female hormones. Again, we know how all of this works, so no one is surprised. Talking about abstract concepts for reproduction is a useful model, but it is just a summary and an abstraction, and it does not change the diversity of human sexual development. Words and abstractions do not change actual biology. We change words and abstractions based on increased knowledge of biology. We can talk about abstractions until we're blue in the face, but ultimately it's only a useful way of trying to describe the actual data. Does that make sense?
All the "dimensions" you mention - hormones, chromosomes, etc. - are downstream of this, and they vary across species (e.g. some don't use hormonal signalling for reproduction, but neuropeptides). While there are variations, including those in sex development that may lead to a disordered system, it doesn't logically follow that sex itself is a spectrum.
To take one of your examples: a hirsute woman with elevated testosterone due to PCOS is female, and having this condition doesn't make her less so. Indeed, this is a condition that only affects people who are female, tied to ovarian function. Her condition can be described perfectly well without pretending that her sex lies on some sort of ill-defined spectrum.
Your comment about "drawing an arbitrary line" doesn't really fit with how biologists see this either, as it's not arbitrary at all but is based on understanding the mechanisms of reproductive function and development. And not based on gathering and arbitrarily categorising data without reference to the underlying system. The mechanistic insight is important.
Going way back upthread, this was originally about fairness in sport, male physiological advantage, and the other commenter getting surprisingly cross at me describing males as male, as he seemed to think there are medical interventions that can be performed on humans that convert males to female, which is not the case. Then you commented stating that sex is a spectrum. This is typically introduced into an argument to try to bolster the claim that it is possible for humans to change sex, the idea being to redefine sex as a cluster of characteristics to be considered separately to reproductive function, and then argue that because things like breast size (through a male taking exogenous oestrogen) and genital morphology (such as surgically inverting a penis to make a hole, and lining the entry point with scrotal tissue) can be changed, this constitutes a change in sex (e.g. a male, by this redefinition, supposedly becoming more female).
So that leads into another issue of why this "sex is a spectrum" idea has been introduced to the world at large. It is not to gain greater understanding of reproductive system, sex development and evolutionary questions regarding sexual reproduction. We can see even from this back and forth between the two of us how it only has rhetorical use, with my requests for precise detail on how this model might work in practice remaining unanswered.
Thanks for the discussion, interested to hear your thoughts on this.
"Errors" are important in models. Look up Type 1 and Type 2 errors. If I had a model for hair color, and it couldn't explain red hair, it would be a pretty terrible model. As I mentioned earlier, red hair and obviously, visibly intersex are about on the same order of magnitude.
To further illustrate this concept, consider humans and horses. You'll notice there aren't human-horse hybrids. We can come up with a criteria or a model to separate humans and horses with 1's and 0's and there's nothing in the middle. That's an example of a binary system. We could come up with a bunch of terrible models too that can't differentiate between the two ("mammals"). But ultimately, I could disprove your argument about transgender in sports even ASSUMING a binary model in sex because it's pretty fundamentally irrelevant. If we can't measure the difference between two things (sports performance between ciswomen and transwomen after 2 years of hormonal therapy), then the difference doesn't really matter. The fact that there's transMEN regularly playing in the Olympics is also fairly revealing.
In hermaphroditic species, the two halves of this reproductive system are both embodied in each individual, and are active either consecutively (as with sequential hermaphrodism) or concurrently (as with simultaneous hermaphrodism). In gonochoric species, these are embodied in two distinct classes of individual, via two distinct developmental pathways. Humans are a gonochoric species.
When you claim "sex is a spectrum" or "sex is bimodal", you are confusing sex characteristics with sex. These characteristics are species-specific, whereas sex itself is a cross-species categorization in which sex determination, sexual development, and sex characteristics will vary.
You comment "let's hypothesize that human sex is [always] determined by [XX or XY] chromosomes" and make the argument from this that conditions like Klinefelter syndrome and SRY-negative XY chromosomes disprove that hypothesis. Yes it does, but the hypothesis was flawed in the first place. There is no "human sex" that is different to "sex". More precisely, what you are actually talking about here are the mechanisms of sex determination and sex differentiation in humans. Analyses of DSDs have been very useful in gaining a deeper understanding of these, just as analyses of rare pathologies in other systems do.
Claiming "sex is a spectrum" adds no utility here. It conflates development with definition, and is used for rhetorical ends rather than advancing scientific knowledge. As our conversation has shown, there's not even any consistent understanding of what this spectrum might look like or where individuals should be placed on such a spectrum.
You mention sterility, but this doesn't change someone's sex. The elderly and infertile retain their sex because it's developmental, not performative. This is also why, for example, we can recognize worker bees as female despite them being infertile.
Going back to sports, the available evidence does not show that male athletes weakened through testosterone suppression are equivalent to female athletes. It is not possible to unbuild the body of a human male and rebuild it as female. Your claim that "scientists have already looked into this, and they determined that after two years of hormone therapy transwomen are fairly hard to distinguish from the natural variation in ciswomen for all their metric" misrepresents the research and doesn't take into account what we see performance-wise when these males are allowed to compete in women's sport. Note that while we observe "transwomen" dominating women's competitions, we don't see the same for "transmen" in men's categories, even when they've been on testosterone for many years. This in itself highlights the impact of sex differences in athletic performance.
[1] Sex is purely defined by gamete size. (Already incorrect, but if that makes the argument easier we can play pretend.) [2] Humans are a gonochoric species. (true) [3] In gonochoric species, unlike simultaneous or sequentially hermaphroditic species, gamete-size generally remains constant throughout the lifetime of the species (also true). [4] Therefore, humans generally maintain the same gamete size throughout an individual’s life (sure, not many people are switching their gamete size throughout their life).
We’re in agreement humans aren’t generally switching gamete sizes through an individual’s lifetime. That would honestly be ridiculous and no one is arguing this. However, while some of these ideas are true and are convenient for talking about various species, it’s not always correct when talking about individuals.
An example of this is using generalized words or labels on anything or anyone. “English-speaking” could mean someone who speaks only English, someone who speaks only a little English. What matters is context and relevance.
Human sexual phenotype can be described by three discrete categories if you want: male, female, intersex. This is what I mean by “spectrum,” I’m literally just mentioning it doesn’t fit the definition of binary (being able to be completely described with 0 or 1 without loss of data). Please see my previous explanation for further details on this. I literally did a proof-by-contradiction.
In individual humans, our genotypes do not always match our phenotypes. For example, XY + No SRY would be functionally identical to XX. XXY and XYY are both viable and happen, and a lot of people might not even realize they don’t have the chromosomes they think they do.
Obviously intersex is about the same proportion of the population as red heads, for context.
So intersex is a perfectly normal and natural human sex phenotype. There are literally human beings living with both gamete sizes for their entire lives, living hopefully happy, healthy lives. This has nothing to do with gonochoric or hermaphroditic species. We’re still a gonochoric species, even if intersex humans exist. Humans aren’t spontaneously changing gamete sizes throughout their lives, but some people literally just have both and have had both since birth. That’s just how it is.
So human sexual phenotypes don’t always match genotypes. They mostly do, probably over 80%, but we’re not honestly sure about the true rate of intersex mostly because it matters so little. As you saw in the textbook chapter I referenced, human sexual phenotype has many factors, but yeah, we can summarize it with three discrete categories: male, female, intersex. That’s again, just how it is. We can debate what to do with intersex, sure, but it honestly doesn’t matter very much.
Your sports argument seems a little strange, I’m honestly not sure I fully understand it:
[1] Gamete size is the only determining factor in human sexual phenotype [obviously incorrect, please see that book chapter] [2] As a society, we divide up sports by sex or gender [yeah, sure, we sometimes do that] [3] Gamete size is relevant in sports [very obviously incorrect, but what you probably mean is that gametes CORRELATE with testosterone, muscle mass differences etc, which is true, and we can measure those correlations] [4] People can’t change their gametes [no one is talking about this, ridiculously irrelevant] [5] Therefore people can’t change their sex?
Trans people exist. We have accepted that there is both biological sex and gender (social construct). Just like genotype and phenotype, they normally match, but sometimes they don’t. I honestly don’t understand why there’s any upset about this, there’s been evidence of this going back pretty far throughout history. We literally get the word hermaphrodite from the ancient Greeks.
So do you only care about transpeople because of sports? There are transmen in the Olympics, so I think they’re doing fine, and I literally linked several papers on transwomen in the Olympics, but I can link them again.
We’ve measured it. This is what science does.
More links: Sex differences and athletic performance. Where do trans individuals fit into sports and athletics based on current research? https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sports-and-active-livin...
SPORTS AND PERFORMANCE IN THE TRANSGENDER POPULATION: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS
https://www.scielo.br/j/rbme/a/CDkTksYcMPcKYTHGfcJLX4K/?lang...
Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3
Honestly, if there is some advantage, they’ll measure it, try to understand it, and then change the rules. I’m sure it’s an ongoing discussion. I’m not sure I see your point with all this.
This is close to the real point of dispute, on which there are approximately three main positions, which amount to two political camps because the last two positions drive the same political conclusion (and can be hard to distinguish):
(1) Sex, socially-ascribed gender, and gender identity are real and distinct things, all of which are (or in the case of active gender should be) multidimensional spectra though they may have something like a bimodal distribution which can naively look binary, and normatively ascribed gender should be aligned to gender identity;
(2) Sex and ascribed gender and gender identity are real and distinct things, the former is a crisp binary defined by particular physical traits (which traits varies among holders of the belief and over time; gross anatomy was popular, combination of X & Y chromosomes was popular, gamete size is currently the most popular), and normatively both ascribed gender and gender identity should conform to sex; when gender identity specifically does not it is a kind of mental illness, that should be treated and corrected, not accommodated and validated;
(3) Sex and ascribed gender are real and distinct things with the nature and relationship described in #2, but gender identity does not exist and is a myth invoked to excuse personal moral deviance and/or sexual perversion.
I'm not super clear on why gamete size has become a popular argument for a so-called binary model, since intersex still exists and there are individuals with both gametes. Not to mention, for sports, gamete size seems much less relevant than hormones and natural variation within each sex/gender, and that seems to be the favorite example. Do you have any insights as to why gametes have become a popular argument?
> You comment "let's hypothesize that human sex is [always] determined by [XX or XY] chromosomes" and make the argument from this that conditions like Klinefelter syndrome and SRY-negative XY chromosomes disprove that hypothesis. Yes it does, but the hypothesis was flawed in the first place. There is no "human sex" that is different to "sex". More precisely, what you are actually talking about here are the mechanisms of sex determination and sex differentiation in humans. Analyses of DSDs have been very useful in gaining a deeper understanding of these, just as analyses of rare pathologies in other systems do.
I'm literally talking about human sexual phenotype. That's it. Phenotype does not always match genotype, that's the whole point. Do you understand the difference between genotype and phenotype, because that's half the point of what I've been discussing. You've also missed my entire point about how we measure models in science and what a model is. That whole demonstration was to show you how we actually test models in science.
> Claiming "sex is a spectrum" adds no utility here. It conflates development with definition, and is used for rhetorical ends rather than advancing scientific knowledge. As our conversation has shown, there's not even any consistent understanding of what this spectrum might look like or where individuals should be placed on such a spectrum
I'm not claiming anything. Human sexual phenotype is not binary, as demonstrated through a binary model with proof by contradiction. This is how we evaluate models. Even if we assume a binary model, as I've mentioned, it doesn't actually matter much since there isn't a huge difference between the two genders for most sports. There are measurable differences for others, but that has nothing to do with gamete size and everything to do with different levels of hormones like testosterone, estrogen et cetera, not gametes. Once again, there is significant overlap between the two sexes to start with.
> Going back to sports, the available evidence does not show that male athletes weakened through testosterone suppression are equivalent to female athletes. It is not possible to unbuild the body of a human male and rebuild it as female.
I'm honestly baffled by this statement. No one is "rebuilding" anyone or anything. I'm not actually sure what you mean by this, but this just further demonstrates that we've moved very far away from anything like science. This just sounds like a strange straw man. If you can't even acknowledge that genotype can be different from phenotype, then there's no point in further discussion, this just seems silly.
> Going back to sports...
Men and women have a lot more overlaps than differences. This has been demonstrated. It was actually surprising to me when I first learned about it. We literally do see plenty of transmen in the Olympics, so I'm not quite sure where you're getting this from. Yes, there are differences too, but again, it has nothing to do with actual gametes and mostly it has to do with testosterone and possibly different forms of estrogen etc. What you're calling "sex characteristics."
Here are a few papers: Sex differences and athletic performance. Where do trans individuals fit into sports and athletics based on current research? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10641525/
Effect of gender affirming hormones on athletic performance in transwomen and transmen: implications for sporting organisations and legislators https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/11/577?ref=goodoil.news
Transwomen might still be a little faster than ciswomen at least a year after hormone therapy, but most of the other metrics were within normal variation after 1-2 years hormone therapy.
Regarding your second point: that there are variations in phenotype, some of them disordered, doesn't mean that "sex is a spectrum". For DSDs, we can describe them in terms of specific developmental differences compared to normal sex development. These are a set of discrete conditions that can be understood without conjuring up ill-defined spectrums. In fact, DSDs in humans have given those who study developmental biology considerable insight into the mechanisms of human sex development more generally.
I see after reading those papers you linked that they further illustrate the point I made earlier: that suppression of testosterone weakens males in some ways, but they still retain physiological advantage from testosterone-driven development earlier in their lives. To advocate for the inclusion of such males in female competitions is to advocate for female athletes to compete at a disadvantage.
If you look at the world records for pretty much every sport, the difference between female and male athletes is very clear. That there exists some overlap between weaker-performing male athletes and higher-performing female athletes doesn't mean that male advantage is significant in almost all sports, especially in ones more reliant on raw strength, such as weightlifting.
You mention the transmen who compete in the Olympics. This is true but they are competing against other female athletes, e.g. Hergie Bacyadan in the most recent Olympics, competing in women's boxing (and in that same Olympics, two males - controversially - won gold, in two other women's boxing divisions). None of them would even come close to qualifying against elite male athletes.
1a: either of the two major forms of individuals that occur in many species and that are distinguished respectively as female or male especially on the basis of their reproductive organs and structures 1b: the sum of the structural, functional, and sometimes behavioral characteristics of organisms that distinguish males and females 1c: the state of being male or female 3: genitalia
Among those who study gender and sexuality, a clear delineation between sex and gender is typically prescribed, with sex as the preferred term for biological forms, and gender limited to its meanings involving behavioral, cultural, and psychological traits. In this dichotomy, the terms male and female relate only to biological forms (sex), while the terms masculine/masculinity, feminine/femininity, woman/girl, and man/boy relate only to psychological and sociocultural traits (gender). This delineation also tends to be observed in technical and medical contexts, with the term sex referring to biological forms in such phrases as sex hormones, sex organs, and biological sex.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sex
So what dictionary are you using where "sex" is purely defined by gametes? Please use references and support. I have literally provided studies, textbook chapters, and dictionary entries. You're not actually arguing anything, or if you think you are, you're begging the question. Sex is based on more than gametes and we've known that for decades.
> I see after reading those papers you linked that they further illustrate the point I made earlier: that suppression of testosterone weakens males in some ways, but they still retain physiological advantage from testosterone-driven development earlier in their lives. To advocate for the inclusion of such males in female competitions is to advocate for female athletes to compete at a disadvantage.
They literally concluded there wasn't a measurable difference in most of the aspects that they're considering after two years (though there was still an advantage in running after 1 year), so that's a very creative interpretation. There are more studies too, but I can see there's limited point in listing them, since you're reading with your own bias.
Also, keep in mind with the papers that I provided, the authors of these papers are PhDs in this specialty studying trans individuals. Meaning that people who are way more knowledgeable about all this view trans individuals as exiting, since before you seemed to be denying that. Also please notice, that they aren't measuring gametes, they're measuring the effects of hormone therapy specifically and how that might apply to sports. Rules etc in sports, sure, we can measure and change them, but there are plenty of phds out there studying both gender and sex. If you're trying to argue that nuances in the Olympics and college-level sports means trans can't exist, that seems like very faulty logic.
> If you look at the world records for pretty much every sport, the difference between female and male athletes is very clear. That there exists some overlap between weaker-performing male athletes and higher-performing female athletes doesn't mean that male advantage is significant in almost all sports, especially in ones more reliant on raw strength, such as weightlifting.
There are many, many sports where this is not the case and separating between men and women happened late, if at all. Sharp shooting et cetera. There are other sports where yes, there are measurable differences. Testosterone can help in certain sports, that's certainly true, but though that CORRELATES with gametes, it's not absolute, once again demonstrating that what we're actually interested in in sports is testosterone etc, not actual gametes.
> You mention the transmen who compete in the Olympics. This is true but they are competing against other female athletes, e.g. Hergie Bacyadan in the most recent Olympics, competing in women's boxing (and in that same Olympics, two males - controversially - won gold, in two other women's boxing divisions). None of them would even come close to qualifying against elite male athletes.
Incorrect. The transmen are competing against other men. Chris Mosier had an injury at the Olympics, which is unfortunate, but he qualified. In 2015 Schuyler Bailar competed in NCAA Div 1 men's team and did pretty well, top 15%. 2018 Patricio Manuel boxed professionally and won. Transathletes are a small percentage of the population and haven't been allowed at the Olympics for very long, so we'll see what happens there.
Overall, I'm not sure what elite sports has to do with the existence of trans people or human sexual development phenotype or how sex is "only gametes" (or chromosomes, you seem to go between both). The rules in elite sports are always changing, and I'm sure they'll change more. You've essentially assumed your gamete argument is true, despite going against the dictionary, the book chapter I listed, and the studies that I provided, all of which acknowledge trans individuals. This is called "begging the question." If we're going into rhetoric, this is sounding very motte-and-bailey fallacy.
One thing I will say, is that fundamentally science is about asking questions and measuring phenomena, generally using models etc to try to discern causality (probability and statistics). Science is NOT about telling people who or how to be or denying people's experience. Science can tell us what will happen when we take a drug, not if we "should or shouldn't" take the drug (that's for us to decide). In studying other cultures or experiences, science isn't about labeling "good" or "bad," or erasing experiences we don't understand. For example, we know from studying many other cultures and languages that there are multiple understandings of "sex" across cultures, especially where there are explicit terms for intersex et, which is why terms like "gender" can be useful.
I'm not sure why you have such a strong reaction to "trans people exist" or why you're trying to act like your views on it are "scientific," when I have provided (1) textbook, (2) dictionary, (3) studies showing that your views that (A) trans people do not exist and (B) sex and sexual phenotype are only determined by gametes are not supported by science and you have fundamentally misunderstood several key aspects of biology and math (binary vs bimodal). I've provided explanations for how we use models in science and how we talk about data. If you're actually interested in learning about this stuff, I hope some of the resources I have listed are helpful. Otherwise, I'm going to assume that this is not a productive discussion of two people trying to understand the world better. I'm sad this is your view of what science is, and if you're ever actually curious about this kind of thing, I hope you find it interesting.
Imagine a biologist discovers a new sexually reproducing species. She does not yet know whether it is hermaphroditic or gonochoric, nor, if gonochoric, which individuals are female and which are male.
What does she investigate to find out?
She examines gamete production: which gonads produce small, motile gametes and which produce large, nutritive ones. That is the criterion that has defined "female" and "male" across all sexually reproducing organisms for well over a century of modern biology.
Everything else - chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, secondary characteristics - are species-specific downstream mechanisms that evolved to achieve that single binary outcome. They are not the definition itself.
I did ask a version of this earlier in my first reply to you, but I think its significance may have been missed. Anyone with a solid grounding in biology should recognise immediately that gametes are the root criterion. No other answer makes sense.
I read and corrected your previous comments then, and I will correct them again now. I know this is more or less what they teach in middle and high school biology, just like you might have learned "electrical current is like water flowing between between two voltages" (not a good metaphor, but one that is often taught) and "evolution is the survival of the fittest" (incorrect, but still sometimes taught). What you learn in college is that a lot of the metaphors that were helpful at the beginning can actually make it harder to learn a more nuanced view that's closer to reality. But there's a reason the dictionary definition is different and not just based on gametes. You're confusing applying abstract concepts to individuals.
>She examines gamete production: which gonads produce small, motile gametes and which produce large, nutritive ones. That is the criterion that has defined "female" and "male" across all sexually reproducing organisms for well over a century of modern biology.
Correct, when talking about species as a whole, this is quite useful. "Female" and "Male" can refer to many different types of species. We even refer to asexually reproducing species as "females" by default. Just like "English-speaking" can be a useful general label in numerous contexts. It's great being able to talk about "English-speaking people" as a generalization, but that label doesn't differentiate between someone who speaks at a first-grade level and a college-level. When we're talking about an individual person, we normally take a more nuanced view, as is reflected in the data.
Please see my previous comments on models, binary, etc. Being able to apply a label to something does not necessarily make it true, but we're back at the beginning and I see no point in going over my points again. You're also essentially confusing genotype and phenotype. There's a reason biologists differentiate between that. But again, I've gone over all this already. As someone with a solid background in biology, yes, gametes are important and are great abstractions for talking about specific things, but more than just gametes go into human sexual phenotype and we've known that for decades.
Anyone who has any kind of background in science or engineering at a college level should be able to understand models and data terms, like binary, type 1 and type 2, error, and abstraction. This is fundamental. If you're actually interested in learning more, please reread my previous comments.
> Regarding your second point: that there are variations in phenotype, some of them disordered, doesn't mean that "sex is a spectrum". For DSDs, we can describe them in terms of specific developmental differences compared to normal sex development. These are a set of discrete conditions that can be understood without conjuring up ill-defined spectrums. In fact, DSDs in humans have given those who study developmental biology considerable insight into the mechanisms of human sex development more generally.
I already addressed this in a previous comment, but please see Type 1 and Type 2 errors in models. I think the example I used in it was there are no horse-human hybrids (outside of fiction) because we can create a true binary model with horses and humans. That is NOT the case for male and female phenotypes in humans. There are individual humans with both organs, different gametes, different chromosomes, both characteristics etc etc. Obviously-intersex are on the order of red hair in humans, so "it's uncommon" isn't a good counterargument. Again: type 1 and type 2 errors in models.
For your other points about disorders, let's use red hair again. Red hair isn't "a disorder," even though technically it's a result of a type of melanin dysfunction: "Red hair occurs due to a genetic mutation in the MC1R gene, which affects the production of melanin pigments in hair. This mutation leads to higher levels of pheomelanin, resulting in the characteristic red or ginger hair color." It's a normal, but uncommon phenotype. We understand why it happens and how it occurs, similar to intersex. We don't actually know all the types of intersex or how they interplay with each other, but either way, it doesn't honestly matter. If someone appeared with genuine blue-pigment hair, that would break our model. Red hair is just another phenotype in the spectrum of hair colors. Same with grey hair. Same with intersex.
We can list all sorts of things as "disorders" or whatever, which is why we use models to discuss data in science, it's a more structured way of evaluating the world. Types of errors are important in evaluating models. There is as-of-yet no binary model for human sexual phenotype. We still generally sort everyone into two discrete categories, but that's what we choose to do as a society, the data itself is not binary. Just to emphasize this once again: models and data how we evaluate and categorize the world using science. Everyone can apply whatever label they want to something. That isn't science. We make progress in science by evaluating models.
Sex is still very bimodal, no one is arguing that, but fundamentally it's a spectrum. It is not just gametes. We have some of types of intersex listed, sure, but it's also just a normal, uncommon human phenotype.
Intersex has provided insights and is interesting to study. We're in agreement there.
For sports, we're not talking chromosomes or gametes at all. They're irrelevant. What they're actually measuring and evaluating is testosterone, muscle mass, etc, which does CORRELATE with gametes, yes. If we're actually concerned about sports, we'll measure and see what happens. But once again, I can assure you that it has nothing to do with gametes or chromosomes or whatever, and a lot more to do with hormones, muscle mass etc. The studies I listed seemed promising, but I'm sure we'll learn more over time.
I think we're in agreement that ultimately, we want athletes to be able to participate in a way that seems fair, by whatever measure that may be. I'm sure they'll collect more data and we'll decide what we want to do as a society. I am certainly not an expert. The studies I mentioned and several others seem promising. There have been some transmen in the Olympics against other men, though not many. There have also been women who have won gold against men in other sports (skeet I think?) before they were separated. There are obviously several sports where men have measurable advantages to women. For trans-athletes, I suppose we'll see what happens and what the data says.
Absolutely none of this justifies statements such as "transwomen are men." They are not. Sex and gender are both real, useful terms, and they have their own applications. Also, much like genotype and phenotype, they do not always match. Sexual phenotype does not always match genotype (chromosomes), organs etc.
We can see and measure the two groups. We can talk about fairness in sports. It is perfectly fine to talk about measuring differences between transwomen and ciswomen. It's perfectly fine to talk about measuring differences between transwomen and (cis or trans) men. It's even perfectly fine to talk about concern for fairness in sports with the inclusion of transwomen and transmen. All of that is fine.
It is not okay (disrespectful) and incorrect to (1) say that they don't exist (2) say that they're something other than what they identify as. None of that is supported by science. Sex and gender as useful, distinct terms are supported by science. We use those terms to study multiple species, cultures, in whatever forms. Intersex is an uncommon, but well supported phenotype that we literally have records of since ancient times and has been fairly common across many cultures. And across many species. It's honestly so broad it is difficult to define. Literally we have entire hermaphroditic species AND hermaphroditic individuals in non-hermaphroditic species. Similar to homosexuality, it's just a natural phenomenon that happens. You can view trans as part of intersex, or as more of a sociological construct, like gender identity. The data is there.
If you're actually just concerned for fairness in sports, then you could have talked about the athletes in a respectful way ("I'm concerned about the fairness of transwomen in sports with ciswomen"). You chose not to. In general, your way of thinking sounds more like religion than science, and I've heard it all before already.
Science isn't a rhetorical weapon. It's a way of studying, evaluating, and communicating about the world, not imposing judgement on it. There is plenty of data supporting trans, gender, intersex, whatever. There are also plenty of respectful ways to discuss this topic, as previously mentioned.
Why go out of your way to talk about it in a disrespectful way? Why hide behind trying to sound scientific, when it's clear you don't have a background in it? Why the focus on sports?
I think it's time we stop dancing around the topic and get to the meat of this discussion.
Consider my original comment on this thread:
"Most of the actual work to stop males from competing in women's sports, through evidence-guided changes in policy, has been driven by female athletes who are directly affected by this, feminists and feminist allies, scientists that study sex differences, and experts in the philosophy of sport.
That it's become such a well-known topic of contention is because sports are a spectator event and there have been some very high-profile instances of this unfairness towards female athletes."
Followed by this reply to a user who had a different view:
"They are male, and retain male physiological advantage even if they undergo interventions like testosterone suppression. It's not the only route by which a male athlete with such advantage might compete in women's sport, nor is it an issue limited to the USA. This is a broader issue affecting the fairness of women's sport in competitions across the world.
For instance, all three medallists in the women's 800m at the 2016 Rio Olympics were male. They had been issued with female birth certificates by their home countries due to having underdeveloped external male genitalia - and therefore according to the rules at the time could enter as female - but they still benefited from testosterone-driven development."
There is no disrespect in these comments.
As to why our conversation has focused on sports and sex differences, it is because it was the original topic before you joined the discussion.
Note that I was very specifically talking about male athletes competing in the female category of sports. This includes both those in the category of "trans" (the Laurel Hubbard types) and those with male-specific disorders of sex development (the Caster Semenya types).
I've said everything I would like to say on all these subthreads so there's no point in repeating myself yet again, but I would urge you to pick up a couple of books on developmental biology and evolutionary biology, and read them with an open mind, so you can challenge your misconceptions around this topic that you seem to have internalised.
I will also say that it's a common pattern for people to try to justify bigotry with "science," not realizing that their arguments don't make sense. Karl Popper is actually considered the father of modern science for his work on falsification being one of the main ways to separate actual science from pseudoscience. This has come up several times lately and I'm very curious about it.
I have read several books in multiple areas of biology. I'm a little amused you're recommending them to me, when I literally linked and referenced one of the books in a previous comment. I hope you actually read more as well. Biology is an amazing field, which is why I studied it in university. I hope you learn more about science in general. I will also mention, however, that reading all the biology books in the world won't help if there's a fundamental misunderstanding in what science actually is and how to differentiate it from pseudoscience.
Statistical Rethinking (all editions) is a great book if you're interested in how models work and how science actually works, as a personal recommendation. The author also has multiple lectures recorded on github and other platforms, such as youtube. Carl Sagan also has an excellent book on distinguishing science from pseudoscience: "The Demon Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark."
> Your comment about "drawing an arbitrary line" doesn't really fit with how biologists see this either, as it's not arbitrary at all but is based on understanding the mechanisms of reproductive function and development…
I talk to biologists all the time for work. I studied biology in college and I work in science and engineering. This is how we talk about data and models in science. What I'm seeing in your response is a fairly deep misunderstanding in how science works, and that's why it might appear to you like I'm not actually answering your question. I am not "proposing a new model" about sex being a spectrum.
Let's take a step back and look at how science works and hopefully we can address this misunderstanding. I'll start with the fundamentals.
We use words to communicate about the world, but they're an imperfect medium. As a quick example, I can call an ant hill a "mountain." What information I might be trying to convey depends on: (1) definition, maybe my definition of mountain is .5 cm, (2) context, maybe I'm speaking metaphorically, (3) relevance, maybe I'm speaking from the perspective of an ant. So key things in communication are (1) definitions, (2) context, (3) relevance. Whatever word I call the object doesn't change the object in any way. This is because all words are representations (or models) of the world, and all models are, by nature, false. They cannot possibly describe every aspect of reality. Words are only as useful as the information they convey. So how can we evaluate the information in words or models?
We evaluate models by treating them as black-box functions and comparing their output to reality. We’re trying to measure how useful or predictive the model is.
How do we do this in practice? We (1) propose a hypothesis, (2) decide which variables are relevant (3) decide on necessary and sufficient conditions or some kind of function. Then we run that function and compare the output of our model to what we measure in reality.
Let’s look at a binary model for human sex. Our hypothesis is that we can define a set of criteria or definitions such that the output is either 1 “female” or 0 “male”. The definition of binary means that it can be fully and completely described by 1 or 0, nothing in the middle. For example, TRUE or FALSE is binary.
Let’s hypothesize that human sex is determined by chromosomes, so therefore XX is female (1) and XY is male (0).
XXY exists (Klinefelter Syndrome). That breaks our model. We can update our criteria. [XX is female] (1) and [XY and XXY are male] (0).
XY + no SRY exists. That also breaks our model. We can update our criteria. [XX and XY + no SRY is female](1) [XY + SRY and XXY is male (0)].
Lots of intersex conditions exist. What does that mean for our model?
To skip forward, we still do not have a defined set of necessary and sufficient criteria where we can describe all outputs of human sexual development with 1 or 0. This means the assumption that the output is binary for our model is broken. Can we still sort everything into binary categories? Sure. Nothing is stopping you from labelling something, but we understand that we’re giving up information while we’re doing this. When we talk about binary models, what we’re referring to is an output of a function or model, not just applying the labels. We do this because we can obviously just apply whatever labels to anything, there’s nothing “scientific” about it. So what’s actually important in evaluating that model is the necessary and sufficient criteria we come up with: the actual function, model etc. This is what I mean by “binary system.” You can still obviously sort the data into binary categories, but the underlying data is fundamentally a spectrum.
This is essentially called a “proof by contradiction.” We had a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, a set of defined definitions (like binary), and we found counterexamples for each one.
Another perspective could be: if I see an individual, what are the chances I could correctly guess characteristics about them (chromosomes etc) based on their phenotype? For male and female, you might be able to fairly accurately guess certain characteristics about them, probably somewhere around 80%. Does that mean that it's impossible for us to sort every individual into two categories? No. But being CAPABLE of sorting or labeling them into two categories does NOT make something binary.
To be honest, the existence of intersex alone should be sufficient to tell you that male and female are not completely “binary” concepts. So we’re dealing with some kind of discrete or continuous “spectrum.” For convenience and simplicity, let’s say it’s male, intersex, female, so discrete but not binary.
Now let’s start to address some of your points.
> "The whole point of female and male is to distinguish the two reproductive roles in sexually reproducing species, whether those are hermaphroditic or gonochoric. The sex binary is based on anisogamy, that is, two classes of gamete being of unequal size."
Yes, that's why "female" and "male" are useful abstract concepts specifically to help talk about reproduction in several species. Using these two terms, we can talk about a diverse spectrum of reproductive strategies, including hermaphroditic and gonochoric.
I think your argument breaks down to:
[1] The terms male and female are strictly to distinguish between gamete size in gonochoric species. [Already incorrect, but sure, that’s one possible definition we can use] [2] Humans are a gonochoric species [yes] [3] Therefore ALL humans are either male XOR female
Is this your argument? Because it can pretty quickly be disproven with one contradictory example: intersex humans exist. Deductively arguing from abstracts also means its application is quite limited. For example, it inherently assumes humans are reduced to their reproductive function, which is obviously false. If we’re purely arguing from the perspective of ability to reproduce, then do you have a larger category in mind for “sterile” humans, including infants, the elderly etc? Obviously not all humans are capable of reproduction, which is why it’s useful as an abstract, but that quickly falls apart once you look at concrete examples like individuals. Again, just because you CAN label everything in a binary way, it doesn’t actually mean that the underlying data is binary.
> To take one of your examples: a hirsute woman…
From your response, I don't think I was very clear with these examples. Let me see if I can make my points more clearly.
Every human has male and female aspects. If you look at one individual, how accurately could you predict certain characteristics about them?
If I say "this person has a beard," could you immediately say with 100% confidence that it was a "male"? No. You could probably guess with fairly high accuracy, about 90%, but you could not be 100% confident.
What I was hinting at with these examples is that there is no "necessary and sufficient" definitions of "male" and "female" for individuals where you can predict with 100% accuracy. It doesn't make anyone "more or less" of whatever sex they're categorized as, but these examples illustrate the complexity of the underlying system. The simple fact is that “male” and “female” labels aren’t always very predictive or relevant when being applied to individuals. Not every “male” has a penis or a prostate or is capable of reproduction, and not every “female” has a uterus, ovaries, or is otherwise capable of reproduction. Humans are more than their reproductive capabilities and simple labels such as "male" or "female" can't fully describe those aspects. Reproduction is not always relevant.
> Your comment about "drawing an arbitrary line" doesn't really fit with how biologists see this either…
Yes, when biologists are abstractly talking about reproduction, individual variation isn’t very relevant. They’re not even talking about sterile individuals. Broadly applying those types of generalizations to individuals isn’t helpful.
> Going way back upthread, this was originally about fairness in sport, male physiological advantage, …
You’re making several pretty big logic leaps in here. Let’s try to sort this out.
First, sport isn’t about reproduction. That’s irrelevant, so please stop trying to argue that gamete size has anything to do with sports. So why do we divide sports into "men" and "women" if reproduction isn't relevant? It's because you've correctly seen that sometimes there's physical, measurable differences between the two groups and we as a society want sports to have some aspect of "fairness." There’s a lot to unpack here, though and you’ve made several incorrect assumptions.
“Male physiological advantage” is an incorrect blanket assumption. Where is the “male physiological advantage” in sharp shooting? Olympic Skeet wasn’t separated by gender from 1968 until 1992, when Zhang Shan from China won the gold metal. After that it’s been divided by sex. Some sports are split by gender for different cultural reasons, and yes, in some sports men as a group tend to be much taller and have advantages in certain areas, but this isn’t as universal as you seem to think. Lots of transphobic people tend to focus on trans women in sports, but they’re dead silent on trans men doing fairly well in the Olympics. There are several examples in basketball, wrestling, swimming etc.
> he seemed to think there are medical interventions that can be performed on humans that convert males to female, which is not the case
There is so much variation in human sexual development, as discussed with intersex, that there honestly doesn’t need to be much “medical intervention.” There is a lot of overlap between the sexes, and the fact that it’s actually so hard to define a criteria to separate them, makes this all easy to understand. And that’s where gender comes in. Gender itself is largely a social construct, so we’re pretty flexible on how we define it. Basically it’s pretty easy to see that it’s a real phenomenon and as scientists, we would like to document and discuss this real phenomenon.
> Then you commented stating that sex is a spectrum. This is typically introduced into an argument to try to bolster the claim that it is possible for humans to change sex, …
Sexual development in humans is hopefully by this point fairly obviously a spectrum. Human intersex exists in many different forms. In general, sports have nothing to do with reproduction, so that’s largely irrelevant. However, we as a society would like to make playing sports generally “fair” and there are general, measurable differences between men and women, and yes, sometimes that does mean men have a physiological advantage over women in certain sports. Scientists have already looked into this, and they determined that after 2 years of hormone therapy transwomen are fairly hard to distinguish from the natural variation in ciswomen for all their metric. That’s why there have been rules in place. I’m actually not sure what the rules are for transmen, but the fact that they’re showing up to the Olympics means that they’re probably doing okay.
> So that leads into another issue of why this "sex is a spectrum" idea has been introduced to the world at large. …
Hopefully you have a better understanding of what I mean now. You’re literally using the terms as a spectrum by talking about intersex and using it to describe hermaphrodite species. Being able to apply binary labels to a system doesn’t make it “binary,” what actually matters is the criteria and the output when we’re talking about models. Does that make sense? By calling it a “spectrum,” I’m not actually introducing some new niche model, the fact that I referenced a textbook should make this clear, I’m just saying the data isn’t “binary” and that should be obvious alone from being able to describe so many different species with two terms.
Hope this clears things up!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/trump-offici...
>The following month, the president said his administration would not approve solar or wind power projects. “We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar,” he posted on Truth Social. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!”
Realisitically, solar is dead in America and China is the undisputed worlds #1 solar superpower. The US might hook up a few little projects here or there, but functionally the US is in full retreat on solar, cedeing the industry and technology to China.
For example, there basically will not be large scale solar in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, etc under this administration. You know, some of the highest value spots.
I'm also not clear how cheaply the US could make its own PV in the event of arbitrary trade war (let alone hot war) between the USA and China.
(The good news there is that even in such a situation, everyone else in the world can continue to electrify with the panels, inverters, and batteries that the USA doesn't buy, but the linked article obviously isn't about that).
https://acretrader.com/resources/farmland-values/farmland-pr...
2. If the profit per acre is low, surely this just means they don't have a better use for the land?
3. Even if you assume they're all idiots who could make more profit if they thought harder about better uses for their land, I'm not clear why the reason for the land being what it is, is supposed to matter?
Nobody is converting irrigated Ogallala aquifer farmland to solar fields, they’re taking marginal land used for grazing and using that for solar fields. Productive farmland can have wind turbines within it, due to the smaller footprint of the turbine tower.
Productive farmland is $10k+ an acre, more if it’s irrigated. The cost of rural land is based on the economic rents/value that can be extracted from the land.
Given the rate at which the aquifer is being depleted, they should. There are some water districts in CA that have encouraged conversion to solar but it's controversial.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/07/california-agricul...
(And I didn't even say in which direction it would change, or exactly what will change.)
